Here on Earth

by Alice Hoffman

  There are times, of course, when the Coward wonders what their lives might have been like if he had treated Hollis, if not like a brother, then like a human being. When he starts to think about what might have been, that’s when the Coward begins to drink gin, his favorite liquid in all the world. So transparent and empty, just like the rest of his life. The one remnant of a schedule which remains in his life is his Friday routine, for that is the day when he takes the single journey that matters to him—across the Marshes, down Route 22, to the liquor store on the edge of town. He goes after dark, always, and all he needs to do is sign an X on the account page. It took a while, but he finally figured out why Mike Howard was letting him have all this booze on credit, when he’s never gotten paid back. Of course, he thought when it hit him. Naturally. Hollis would gladly foot the bill for arsenic as well, if that had been his pleasure.

  On clear days, the Coward sits on the sagging porch of his old house and considers everything in the Marshes that could kill you, if quick suicide was what you were after. You could, for instance, eat the thin, poisonous pods of milkweed stalks or ingest the bitter leaves of the mallows. You could reach down and pluck one of the orange mushrooms that not even the ants will go near. But the end results would be nasty, and messy as well. Gin, however slow, doesn’t make you foam at the mouth like the mushrooms would. There are many ways to accomplish what the Coward’s after, but liquor is the most civilized method. In fact, it’s the last piece of civilization in his life.

  At night, when people in the village are fast asleep, he still hears the sound of fire. It’s a sound from hell, all twisted and hot. You get thirsty when you hear a sound like that in your dreams. You get terribly thirsty and there’s not a damned thing you can do about it, except to take the same route every Friday and make certain not to answer your door. You never know who you’ll find out there on your own porch; it may be someone who believes it’s a righteous person’s duty to convince the Coward he has to stop drinking and turn his life around, when it’s abundantly clear he’s never going to do that. He’s here for good; for better or, more likely, for worse, all the rest of his days.

  9

  Since her return to Fox Hill, all March has accomplished is an orderly mess. There are currently twenty-five boxes in the kitchen, all labeled to go to the Library Association’s booth at the Harvest Fair, which is always held in the basement of Town Hall. Most of the objects March has packed, she knew by heart: The cake pans Mrs. Dale seemed to collect, dozens of them. The lace curtains, the throw pillows, the ceramic candlesticks from England. March’s father’s law books have already been donated to Deny Law School, carted there by Ken Helm, who’s been running all March’s errands, since she decided not to replace her rental car. Eight silver place settings, brought out only on holidays, have been mailed home to California, where they will most likely never be used.

  Judith, who didn’t care much for jewelry, had only three good pieces: A gold necklace, which March has given to Harriet Laughton, one of Judith’s dear friends. A pair of heavy gold earrings, rarely worn, has been presented to St. Bridget’s Hospital, to be auctioned off to the highest bidder at the next fund-raising drive. The lovely, square-cut emerald Judith never took off, March now wears on her right hand. Luckily, March found the emerald in an envelope stuffed into a night table drawer she was clearing out. March studied that ring so often, as Mrs. Dale folded laundry or planted mint or tucked her in at night, that she cannot help but wonder if the emerald has affected her career choice. The jewelry she fashions is simple in design; as with this ring, the overall effect often depends on small, but perfect, stones. She favors green and blue in her work: topaz and tiny sapphires, crystals and aquamarines, Chinese jade and emeralds, of course, although none has appealed to her as much as the stone she now wears.

  Today, while March works on organizing the house, Judith’s little dog sits by the window, waiting for rabbits. Each time the dog spies one, out in the orchard or calmly chewing mint by the back door, it goes completely berserk.

  “Will you stop that?” March complains, because whenever the dog barks, she’s startled all over again.

  Aside from the dog, the house is amazingly quiet. There’s no TV switched on, no radio, no sound of traffic. And there’s definitely no Gwen. March had expected she’d have to argue constantly with her daughter; she’d imagined Gwen would want to sleep until noon or one, when she’d rise only to throw herself in an easy chair to complain, grouse, whine, and threaten, all the while eating cookies or frozen pizza, spreading crumbs on the rug and talking about teenage suicide statistics.

  None of this has happened. When March wakes in the morning, Gwen is already gone, her bed in the sewing room neatly made, her cereal dish washed and drying on the dish rack that March will have to pack up today. She’s been out for a walk, Gwen explains when she returns later in the day; she’s been running, getting herself in shape. March wouldn’t believe a word of it—Gwen is usually the most sedentary creature on earth; getting off the couch to search for the remote is often the most movement she manages to accomplish—but there’s a rosy cast to the girl’s skin when she comes back to the house, and a fine film of sweat on her forehead, all of which seems proof of her honesty.

  With no distractions—no Gwen, no car, no one other than Susie calling on the phone—March should be done clearing out the house, but the work is going slowly, as if each trinket and kitchen utensil, every sweater and scarf were stuck in molasses. Now and then, March comes across some item which truly surprises her, and then she gets completely side-tracked. This morning, for instance, she found a box of matches from a restaurant called the Blue Dolphin, a small, family-run place down by Lamb’s Cove, less than ten miles away. Seeing those matches, she remembered a night nearly thirty years earlier, an evening Mrs. Dale had off, but because taking care of children is not a job that’s easily compartmentalized, as soon as Judith came home she went upstairs to check on March.

  When she came to sit on the edge of March’s bed, Judith Dale smelled of garlic and cologne, a combined scent that was both lemony and pungent. She had appeared so dreamy and young that March had scrambled to her knees to get a better look. Mrs. Dale’s hair was curled, from the damp salt air at Lamb’s Cove. She’d shown March this box of matches, with its smiling dolphin logo; she’d said this restaurant had the best shrimp scampi and the most fabulous cheesecake, and some grown-up drink called a mimosa that March has had a fondness for ever since hearing its beautiful name. Now, March realizes it was love that made the menu so special, and that Mrs. Dale’s dinner partner that night was probably Bill Justice.

  Though March is trying to divest, she has kept the box of matches, just as she has held on to one of her brother’s blue ribbons from his high school debating team. She went out to the Marshes to visit him, but, exactly as the Judge had warned, Alan wouldn’t open the door. In all honesty, she was relieved. What would she say to him after all these years? Why presume that she knows him? If you’re disconnected from someone for a long enough time, does blood still commit you to one another? Does history, or fate? Alan is not the only one March has attempted to contact. Twice, she has phoned Hollis. She’s embarrassed about it, she’s mortified, yet she couldn’t seem to stop herself. Both times she called, she felt completely possessed—some demon held the receiver, and dialed, and waited, and then, thank goodness, hung up. If she was giving herself a test, she has failed. Now that she’s gone this far, she wants to keep calling. His voice is deeper than she remembers, and much more interesting than it should be.

  “Take my advice,” Susanna Justice had recommended when they went out to the bowling alley, which serves the best burgers, last night. “Go home before anything happens.”

  March had vowed she wouldn’t tell Susie about the calls, but as soon as Gwen wandered off with two local girls Susie had introduced her to, March admitted she’d been phoning him.

  “It’s nothing,” March vowed. “It’s like a game.”

  �
��There are no games,” Susie had insisted. “Other than Monopoly.”

  Susie is a big fan of Richard Cooper’s, and she always has been. She’s told herself that if she could find a man as good as Richard, she’d marry him tomorrow. But of course, she may have found exactly that in Ed Milton, the new police chief, and what does she go and do but cancel a date with him in order to have dinner with March at the bowling alley. As they dined, they had a perfect view of Gwen and the two girls from town, whose mothers March and Susie went to school with about a million years ago. The girls rolled one gutter ball after another, and from the look on Gwen’s face, she was the only one who cared.

  “Hollis is bad news, and he always has been,” Susie said. How Hollis manages to get his way in this town never fails to amaze her, but he knows who to charm and who to pay off, and in the end, if he wants something—whether it’s business zoning at the end of Main Street or the DPW to plow his properties first—he gets it. “You’re going to be sucked in all over again.”

  “He’s a whirlpool, is that what you’re saying?” March had laughed. “Don’t worry so much. I’m married, remember?”

  “I remember,” Susie had said, pointedly.

  “Don’t say the rest of that,” March had warned.

  “Fine.”

  “Because I do too, Susie. I remember real well.”

  Today, to spite Susanna or to prove something to herself, she phones Richard three times. But Richard is busy and distracted, and really, all he wants to know is when she’s coming home.

  “The end of the week,” March promises, but already she’s thinking she’d like to stay for Founder’s Day, which celebrates the night when Aaron Jenkins ran over Fox Hill more than three hundred years earlier.

  Gwen has heard all about Founder’s Day from the girls who have befriended her, and now when they go for sodas at the Bluebird Coffee Shop, Lori and Chris assume the Founder’s celebration is the reason Gwen is so intent on staying in Jenkintown. Those girls would never guess that Gwen rises before dawn so she can visit the horse down the road. They think she doesn’t meet them in the evenings because she’s afraid to walk across Fox Hill in the dark, but in fact, she has better things to do. She’s down in the pasture when darkness falls, feeding a beautiful old horse some fallen apples and the sugar cubes she steals from the coffee shop.

  Gwen has no idea that the man who owns the fence she sneaks under, who owns the grass beneath her feet and the horse whose mane she likes to braid, always knows when someone has trespassed. Hollis has found a piece of frayed rope, a makeshift rein he supposes, kept beside the tree stump. He has seen footprints in the frost. He never likes anyone on his property—what’s his is his, after all-although when he first saw these signs he thought March might be his trespasser, and he felt truly exhilarated. He felt the way he used to when he’d play cards down in Florida and bluffed someone into letting him win.

  Ever since March arrived, he has been keenly aware of her proximity. He goes to stand outside in the dark, cold morning with the knowledge that she is just down the road. Whenever he drives into town he is mindful that he could run into her anywhere—at the hardware store or waiting for a red light to change on Main Street. However it finally happens, she must come to him. That’s the way it has to be; that’s the way it will be. This is the reason Hollis is biding his time, no matter how difficult this is for him; it’s why he stands there in the morning with his desire locked inside of him rather than rushing to knock on her front door. He’s not some beggar. He’s not some fool. It’s the night that causes him problems; that is the time when he can no longer bear the way he feels. That’s when he drives over to the hill. He makes sure to cut his lights and engine before she can notice his presence; he parks there and watches the house, the way he has, every now and again, for all these years.

  Hollis no longer believes March is the trespasser who is wandering through his pastures. Whoever does leaves cigarette butts on the road and candy wrappers in the weeds. She’s careless and thoughtless, nothing like March; a teenager probably, with some silly notion that fenced beasts should be set loose. Hollis is even surer of his theory when he notices that Hank has a flushed, distant look to him when he comes in for supper. On this day, Hank seems to be hurrying with his chores and he turns down an offer of food—a dead giveaway that something’s wrong.

  “Someone’s been riding Tarot,” Hollis says.

  Hank is at the refrigerator, getting himself a can of soda; a pinkish tint spreads across the back of his neck as soon as Hollis mentions the horse. Bingo.

  “Know anything about it?”

  Hank opens his soda and waits for his pulse to slow down. “Nope,” he says.

  “Really?” Hollis’s voice sounds flat; he doesn’t give much away.

  “Want me to check it out?” Hank doesn’t even know why he’s lying, except that he feels Hollis will ruin this for him if he finds out about the girl. He knows he owes Hollis. The fact that he’s here at all, eating three meals a day at this kitchen table, is a measure of Hollis’s charity. And yet he keeps his secret. He has, in fact, been watching the girl every evening, and each time he does, he falls for her a little bit more. What he feels for her is tearing him apart and keeping him together and, it appears, it is also turning him into a liar. “I can hang out tonight, and see if anybody shows up.”

  Hollis finishes his dinner—a bologna and cheese sandwich and a bag of chips—and brings his plate to the sink. “I’m impressed,” he says coldly. “I didn’t think you could lie right to my face.”

  “I don’t know who she is.” The one time Hank is dishonest, and he’s caught—well, it figures. “That really is the truth.”

  “I’m not surprised, since you don’t seem to know much of anything.” Hollis washes his plate and stacks it on the drain board. “Does she come from the village? From Route 22?”

  Hank shakes his head. “From over the hill.”

  “Then I’ve got news for you,” Hollis says. If Hank were paying more attention to Hollis’s tone, he’d hear something rare—Hollis is actually pleased. “I know who she is.”

  They go up to the hill together. Twilight is coming earlier, and the dusk is no longer purple, but is instead that inky blue which is always a sign of colder weather to come. When they get to the very top, which looks out over all the pastures below, Hollis crouches down. Everything he sees, he owns. There’s only one thing left, and he’s about to get that too.

  “I’ll bet your little friend is staying at the house on Fox Hill.”

  There’s something strange in Hollis’s voice, but Hank is too wound up to notice. Hank nods at the road; sure enough, here comes the girl. “That’s her.”

  She’s wearing her black ski jacket and tight black jeans and heavy boots that make a clumping noise. This girl may be March’s daughter, but she didn’t inherit much from March, at least not in Hollis’s opinion. She’s nowhere near as pretty, and she’s stupid as well. There she goes, ducking under the fence, heading for the old stump, where she searches for the rope Hollis confiscated and now has in his pocket. It’s Richard she resembles, and maybe that’s why Hollis feels such immediate distaste. Here is the reason March would not come back to him. Frankly, Hollis isn’t impressed.

  Gwen seems puzzled when she can’t find the rope, but she climbs onto the stump anyway, then whistles.

  “Jesus Christ.” Hollis snorts. “She thinks she’s calling a fucking dog. Look at her.”

  Down in the pasture, Gwen is unaware that she’s being watched, but for some reason she feels nervous. This is her secret, and she doesn’t want to share it. She needs to come up with a good excuse to stay on here. She’ll say she’s heard the high school in Jenkintown is great, so much better than the one she’s been attending, or she’s been involved with drugs back at home. She’s already decided—she’s not going back to where she was a major nothing, inside and out. Tonight, it’s even colder than usual, but Gwen’s made sure to wear the leather gloves she found in one
of those boxes her mother is packing. She claps her hands and whistles again and the horse appears from the woods and trots right to her, as he always does. She leans close and whispers a greeting, while the horse, supremely pleased at being told how wonderful he is, noses for the carrots she keeps in her coat pockets.

  Up on the hill, Hollis rises to his feet. He watches the girl pull herself onto the horse with no reins and no saddle and no idea, it would seem, of any danger.

  “Well, there she is,” he says. “March Murray’s daughter. That makes her your cousin.”

  Cruelty never loses its flavor, at least not for Hollis. The look on Hank’s face is exactly what Hollis expected: pure confusion.

  “That’s what she is to you,” Hollis goes on. “Your first cousin.”

  They go down the hill in the dark. What is Hank supposed to do now? Stop thinking about her twenty-four hours a day because they are somehow related? Well, he can’t do that. He’s not going to do that.

  “Get off,” Hollis calls when they get to the fence.

  Gwen and the horse, who have been walking through the meadow, stop dead when they hear his voice.

  “Right now,” Hollis shouts.

  Startled, Gwen quickly swings her legs over and gets down. The horse hovers behind her.

  Hollis tosses the rope to the girl. “Put it around his neck and lead him out.” He swings open the gate.